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Tuesday, 30 December 2014

For me, the campaign
for Scottish independence was the most significant, and certainly the most
entertaining, political event of 2014. As Montaigne said, “There are some
defeats more triumphant than victories” and this was perhaps one. The spectacle
of the whole British ruling class hysterically panicking as it realised it had
completely miscalculated the situation was wonderful to behold. Suddenly, it seemed,
trainloads of Labour bigwigs were heading north, sweeteners at the ready! Even
the royals were starting to get narky.

Although the
campaign was ostensibly about independence, it had quickly morphed into a
revolt against free-market capitalism and against privatisation, racism,
austerity and war. Although the ‘impossible’ did not happen, and the union did
not fracture, the referendum gave birth and momentum to a popular movement which
was not narrowly nationalistic but, on its left flank, represented a youthful, working
class revolt against ‘politics as usual’ and towards a more socialistic model.

However, the
main beneficiaries of the independence campaign have been the Scottish National
Party (SNP) and the main losers the Scottish Labour party. SNP membership has
grown to nearly 100,000, while Labour has shrunk to 13,000. Its reward for
getting the Tories and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) off the hook over independence has been a
collapse in support for Labour across Scotland. The growth of the SNP has
created problems for the far left too, to which I shall return.

But, to be
honest, Labour has been creating the conditions for its own undoing for years,
maybe decades. The arrogant assumption that core Labour voters, not just in
Scotland, but in England and Wales, have nowhere else to go and can therefore
be used during elections but abused as far as protecting their interests is
concerned, could not inform Labour policy indefinitely without consequences.

The decay of
the mainstream parties nationally has been a long-term process. In 1951 Labour
and the Tories won more than 96% of the vote between them, now they struggle to
get 70% at very best. The impact of the 2008 economic crisis has accelerated
this decline, and it has been traditional social democratic parties that are most vulnerable, notwithstanding the ability of right
populist parties like UKIP to also bite into the Tory vote. The pernicious
effects of ‘triangulation’, the decline in influence of unions and other
working-class voices, pressure from the IMF, and Labour’s embrace of the market,
have rendered it largely indistinguishable from other parties that are
ostensibly the ‘organising committees of the ruling class’. For years Britain
has grown an increasingly homogenous politics – in Tariq Ali’s phrase, ‘the extreme
centre’, or, to use George Galloway’s more ribald term, ‘three cheeks of the
same arse’. We have got used to having reformism without reforms for many
years, but now so-called ‘reformist’ parties have completely inverted the
meaning of the word. It no longer means improving the lot of workers, but
making their lives and living conditions harder and more distressing.

It was clear
that this situation could not continue indefinitely. Despite the grip of Labour
on many unions and the completely unwarranted loyalty of many voters to the
party, not to mention the obstacle for small parties of the ‘first-past-the-post’
electoral system, it was clear that the embracing of neoliberalism by left reformism
was eventually going to force workers to seek to protect themselves by other
means and through other institutions, and this is what is happening in
Scotland. Labour trails the SNP by 20 points according to a series of polls for
the 2015 election, and 20 Labour seats are at risk, with even Labour
strongholds like Glasgow vulnerable. It is a downwards trajectory which will be
accelerated by the election of the Trident and Iraq-war supporting Blairite Jim
Murphy as leader of the Scottish Labour party.

The result
of the 2015 election is hugely unpredictable – the most unpredictable in living
memory. The decline in support for the traditional three parties is accompanied
by the entrance of what Toby Helm of the Observer rather melodramatically calls
‘insurgent forces’. On the right is UKIP, in Scotland the SNP, and nationally
also the Greens, up to 6% in many polls and in at least one ahead of the Lib
Dems. Even with ‘first-past-the-post’ some of the smaller parties could well
end up in coalition as power-brokers. What is becoming increasingly clear is
that the mainstream parties will never again rule as they once did. But where
in all this is the socialist left?

In the
absence of a left alternative to Labour, it is UKIP which I heard on the radio
absurdly claiming to be the inheritors of the Levellers, Chartists and
Suffragettes. I nearly choked on my muesli. The 2015 general election presents
the left with a dual challenge –first to mobilise against UKIP’s poisonous
policies and secondly to begin the process of building an united left. That is
why Sheridan is wrong to say there should be no electoral challenge to the SNP
in 2015. The Greens and the nationalists are not anti-capitalist parties:
although we can unite with them against Tory policies, against austerity and
inequality, the nationalists believe in building up capitalism, not taking
power away from the capitalists altogether. The closer they get to power the
more they suck up to big business to show they are market friendly. Already we
have seen Alex Salmond’s willingness to do business with right-wing business
tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch, Brian Souter and Donald Trump. We saw how
Brighton’s Green councillors cut bin workers’ wages and played along with
spending limits imposed by Whitehall, despite being elected on an
anti-austerity ticket.

We cannot
postpone any longer creating a united left pole of attraction, which is why the
Trades Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) project is an important one. Even
in Wales, where we are unlikely to get any significant votes, being squeezed by
the Communist party, the Socialist Labour party and Plaid Cymru, it is the
process of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party working together
with others in an united fashion which is important. We need in the medium term
to combine with wider forces, linking up where possible with Left Unity,
ideally with a major trade union or two breaking from Labour and putting its
resources into building a political alternative. Right now this sounds like pie
in the sky, but if Labour does badly in 2015 who knows what could happen? These
are unpredictable times, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

This erosion
of support for the traditional parties is an European-wide phenomenon. Not just Britain, but Ireland,
Greece and Spain all have general elections due not later than the next 18
months, In Greece the coalition government has already fallen, triggering an election
which could well see the radical left party Syriza - now 5 to 10 percent ahead
of the ruling conservative New Democracy party - come to power. Some polls in
the Irish Republic put Sinn Fein narrowly ahead of both the ruling Fine Gael
party and the once dominant party of Irish capitalism, Fianna Fail. And in
Spain two recent polls put the newly-formed left-wing Podemos on 27.7 and 28.3
percent, beating both the main opposition PSOE Socialist Party and the ruling
conservative Popular Party.

The fracturing
of the old order is leading to political polarisation and fragmentation across
Europe. If the left cannot seize the opportunities open to it, then other
forces will be ready to benefit. The stakes are high as we enter the new year,

Wednesday, 24 December 2014

I won’t put
a cherry on a turd - it’s been an appalling year in many ways. On the international
front we’ve seen the bombing of Gaza, war in the Ukraine, the degeneration of
what had started as a popular uprising in Syria into a sectarian proxy war, the
emergence of ISIS and counterrevolution in
Egypt. While in Britain the Con-Dem coalition has continued to unleash more
outrageousness on public sector workers, the disabled, those on benefits. And
resistance here has been disjointed, disconnected, incoherent.

There have
been bright spots, which I’ll return to later, but on the industrial front,
despite the rhetoric, union leaderships have by and large been useless, with no
real coordination or generalisation of struggle. ‘So what else is new?’ I hear
you cry. Individual groups of workers can put up determined resistance, like
the Unite members at the Defence Support Group, Unison care workers, bus
workers and firefighters, but there is no attempt by the leadership to pull
these fights together into a serious struggle.

Rank and
file workers so far have lacked the confidence to act independently, although there
have been some unofficial walkouts, and the recall conference forced out of
local government Unison in protest at the pay sellout is welcome. The refusal by
union leaders to link up the strikes is to avoid embarrassing Labour as we
enter an election period (mind you, one has to ask what their excuse was in
preceding years), or, in the case of local government Unison, to avoid putting local
Labour councils on the spot. The danger for us of endless token one-day strikes
and protests that the bosses can easily ride out is the risk of demoralisation
and disillusionment among union members, or in the case of Unison, members
arguing to leave the union altogether. This can result in a passivity that can
easily be manipulated by the leadership and that fits the electoral politics of
Labour like a glove.

But people
are resisting and will resist, one way or another. The attacks are coming so
thick and fast that resistance is forced on us. Obviously industrial action is our
most powerful weapon, but campaigns based in the community also have potential.
Over in Ireland the attempt to introduce water charges has been met
by a huge protest movement, with marches in Dublin of 100,000 (the equivalent
of 1.5 million marching in London) in October and 200,000 in total in various towns in November, and a campaign of non-payment planned.And in London campaigns like
that around the New Era Estate, which forced US investor Westbrook Partners to
withdraw from evicting families, instead selling its development to an affordable
housing organisation, show that we CAN win, even when going up against
multinational corporations, especially over such an issue as housing, and the
‘class cleansing’ of parts of London.

But the most
momentous event in Britain of 2014 was the Scottish independence referendum,
or, as it became known on Twitter, #indyref. I will go into that in my next
post, but before that I want to come out in defence of Russell Brand. I had a
discussion with a comrade who was eager to rubbish him as a trendy millionaire trying
to extract some radical chic out of politics. This sort of criticism is easy,
because his politics don’t necessarily fit together neatly or consistently.
Although he talks of revolution, on The Trews he says it’s a ‘peaceful
revolution’ he has in mind, for example. But his role in the New Era battle was
brilliant. The sort of attacks on him launched by a whole range of people from
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian to Nick Cohen in The Observer to a hatchet job by
the Sun accusing him of hypocrisy show that he is saying things they perceive
as dangerous, and as outside the bounds of acceptable neoliberal discourse.

Millions of
young people listen to him. To dismiss him as just a trendy lefty is just silly.
We should welcome his interventions, engage with what he says, and, until he
says something like, “all Trotskyists are the spawn of Satan” we should regard
him as a powerful source for good on the left, and welcome the fact that he is making
an alternative politics visibleto
infinitely larger numbers than we could.

On the
Saturday after the Question Time in which Brand called Farage a ‘Poundland
Enoch Powell’, although comrades were away at conference and our numbers on the
paper sale depleted, we sold 13 papers on ‘No to Racism, No to UKIP’, and had
some good conversations with people who were beginning to see through Farage’s
façade. After the sale, a couple of us had a serious discussion about whether at
least some of this was a reflection of the ‘Brand effect’.

Monday, 8 December 2014

My last blog
post was, I think, back in April. Much blood, both literal and metaphorical,
has flowed under the bridge since then. Although I usually blog on politics,
history, etc, with a little dash of poetry, at the moment it’s necessary to get
some personal stuff off my chest before I can continue with my usual themes. The
observation that misfortunes don’t come singly has been quite correct in my
case. After my wife and I split up earlier this year I suffered some health
problems which involved an operation and a spell in hospital. The health
problems are ongoing although I am much better now than I was 6 months ago.
However, I’ve had to accept that I need to make lifestyle changes if I don’t
want these illnesses to worsen. The health problems, while they may have been
triggered by the relationship crisis, were in all likelihood the result of
years of bodily neglect which I won’t go into here but which have been long
term. Making these changes may help things and they may not – but if I
continued as if nothing had happened I would be asking for trouble.

I took some
comfort from Trotsky’s words in ‘Problems of Everyday Life’.

“The depth
and strength of a human character are defined by its moral reserves. People
reveal themselves completely only when they are thrown out of the customary
conditions of their life, for only then do they have to fall back on their
reserves.” I am fully aware, of course, that my misfortunes are absolutely piffling
when compared with the misfortunes of increasing numbers of men, women and
children as the crises of capitalism globally and the imposition of brutal
austerity measures in Britain make life immeasurably worse for millions of
people. When I see the bombed hospitals of Gaza I am humbled by the
extraordinary ability of ordinary people not only to survive but to fight back
in the teeth of the most vicious and ruthless attacks by vile and brutal
enemies.

As usual,
Trotsky again gets it absolutely right: “Life is not an easy matter…you cannot
live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have
before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness,
above all kinds of perfidy and baseness”. For most of my adult life, that
‘great idea’ has been revolutionary socialism. I am glad to get back into
blogging, and I hope that before the year’s end I can write something of the
politics of the year gone by and the prospects for what looks set to be a very
interesting 2015!